James

You might just have won, too. I had fun, as always, but this week I wasn't quite as appalling as I am sometimes, I think.

In case anyone was in any doubt, Flash Forward is turning out to be quite crap. I'm only up to episode three, but any promise the premise might have had is being thoroughly squandered. Can one thoroughly squander?

That does happen in some games. For a while it was the case in Team Fortress 2, I believe, and people set up servers just for getting the achievements. I think as long as you have some sort of interactivity that allows for actions outside of what is considered sensible or expected, people will make use of that capability. Either you limit the possibilities, or you allow the player to jump on the NPC's head while he relays some tragic tale, and grind out achievements for three hours, and generally "play it wrong". I have my reservations about achievements, but in theory the prospect of some optional additional structure to a game is a good one.

I just found out Themselves are playing London tonight. I would quite like to see them, but I haven't been getting enough sleep lately, and I'm kind of hesitant to go to concerts mid-week, anyway. Also I have no idea if it's sold out. My point being maybe I'll be at A, maybe I'll be at B, maybe I'll not.

Yeah, that's excellent. You beat the job shortage there apparently is!

Well kids are pretty shit. But so are adults.

Like I said, there's no real reason why they should have known about them, but it was shocking to me. Perhaps it made me feel old, but Alien was probably one of the most famous films I was aware of in my childhood, and it was made some time before I was born, let alone before I was old enough to watch it. It seemed like a pretty culturally significant thing. But yeah, I'm no film buff. There are condemnable holes in my viewing history. I'm just feeling alienated by the youth of kids. I mean, I'm still pretty young, but there's a disparity between my actual age and my subconscious assumption that I'm still in my late teens.

I should really try the DLC. The combat infuriated me, too, but I came away from the game really excited about the possibilities, even if they weren't fully realized (to my eyes). There's greatness in there, certainly.

Yeah, there sadly was a second one. It had a completely disgusting sub-plot where an Alien-Predator was looking for pregnant women to plant its chest(/belly)bursters in. This sub-plot went absolutely nowhere, and seemed really tasteless in a bad and unjustified way and generally awful and lazy and stupid and bizarre. That's my main memory of the film. Other than that, it was basically a collage of scenes from other films, particularly those in its two ancestral series.

A couple of weeks back I overheard a conversation on the train between a bunch of school kids. One boy was telling the others, "You know the Alien vs Predator films? Did you know there was an Alien film before them?" The others seemed surprised, which distressed me. I don't suppose there's any reason why they should have known that, but it seemed mad and depressing. For these kids, the primary reference point for one of my favourite films is a pair of utterly shit films. I guess this isn't very relevant, other than the superficial qualities of being related to horror films and being related to the youth of today.

Well clearly ideas like "better" and "worse" depend entirely on the criteria you're judging things by. If familiarity is at the top of that list, you wouldn't want to change a list. AND SO ON.

Is that Scavenge mode? Shouldn't that be 30th and 31st? Or do they mean Leeds and London, respectively?

If you're going to be like that, the first digit of the year is the least relevant since it only changes once a millennium, so we should write it backwards. We have the convention of having the largest unit first in numbers, regardless of which part is most significant to our interests at any one time. SERIOUS BUSINESS. EDIT: I didn't see that there was another page. Oops. In writing meant for general consumption it's essential to use the whole thing with dashes to avoid ambiguity, but for my own purposes I know how I format things, so I often prefer to save a few characters. I'm sure you know that POSIX time is just that, and is used in a lot of computing contexts. The advantage of the whole YYYY-MM-DD thing is that, while being more logical and simple for a machine to parse, it's also readable by a human. For a time of any real size to be meaningful to a person it has to be broken into units larger than milliseconds, so calculations would have to be done every time someone wanted to interpret a date in that format. YYYY-MM-DD is, I think, a comfortable middle ground. Part of what's good about YYYY-MM-DD is that it obviously isn't one of the other formats. No other format has the year at the beginning, so at worst a person will be confused and not know how to read it. That's pretty bad, granted, but there's a much lower risk of somebody misinterpreting it without even realizing the potential for confusion. Still, I'm generally a pessimist on the subject of reform. I doubt people on the whole will organize themselves enough to make the switch, or even judge it to be particularly beneficial. Which is fine, I guess.

Yeah, he seems like a nice guy, but something about him drives me up the wall. A lot of the current 1Up guys are pretty infuriating to me, in fact. Perhaps it's a sign that I was listening to people talking about computer games too much. Although the main thing that pissed me off about Geekbox was the TV talk. They seemed to really like some fairly dumb stuff.

I just saw you boot that up on Steam. Hooray for actually doing things you say you will!

I use that (actually I generally go for YYMMDD), but I had no idea it had any particular association with Japan. In fact, I was under the impression it was the most internationally neutral option. But yes, it's clearly the most logical option given how we write numbers in general. I wonder if anyone uses YYYY-DD-MM just to re-introduce the stupid ambiguity into things.

A friend of mine is seeing them live at Wembley tonight.

Unless I finish work early, it is for me. I would want to go home and drop my stuff off, which would be at about six, and allowing maybe half an hour to sort myself out and another to get into London, I'd be there at about seven. But I don't think we all need to turn up at once or anything, do we?

OK, cool. I think between you and my extra-forum friends we have a full set, so unless anything goes wrong, ENTRY IS NOW CLOSED. I'll PM you concerning the details, Miffy.

If anyone else wants to get in on some L4D2 4-pack action, I'm trying to arrange one for a friend of mine.

a) I apologize for us Brits' failure to join the dots on the whole Boost issue I too thought the gun sound effects in the clips sounded like a kid was making them with his mouth c) Was I the only person who initially thought Jake was saying that the new song has "wizling"?

I've been planning on getting one or both for a while, and was even thinking of getting one or both for my recent holiday, but I only ever have these thoughts when I have no means to buy one. I suppose that means I should order it right now, what with the Internet and all. Fine, I've ordered some books. I guess I'd better order some music while I'm at it, too, right? FINE, I'VE DONE THAT AS WELL. HAPPY NOW?

NOBY NOBY NOBY BOY NOBY NOBY NOBY BOY NOBY NOBY NOBY NOBY BOY

I saw this thread and was suddenly reminded of this.

I've occasionally been having a bit of trouble paying for things on Steam recently, but they seem to resolve if I just wait for a bit. I don't know if that's fraud protection or something (I have a habit of making several separate purchases in quick succession because of deal-driven impulsiveness). I was able to buy some groceries on my debit card in Sweden when we found ourselves without cash, and there was no objection to that. No alert about potential fraud to my e-mail or phone, either. Should I be annoyed about that? I'm not.